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Evil villain genius has Mr. Incredible cornered. The bad guy’s prattling on about his devious plans and almost lets Mr. Incredible escape.
“You caught me monologuing,” our villain says, verbally slapping himself upside the head and reminding us of the comic book conventions that The Incredibles is at least partly a spoof of.
In Sin City, all the bad guys monologue. At length. The good guy, seemingly down and out, waits for the villain to start blabbing so he can slowly reach for a hidden gun, knowing he has all the time in the world.
Sin City is a comic book come alive.
Other adaptations – Superman, Batman, X-Men – have failed to create even a partial simulacrum of their particular universe, but Sin City gets it exactly right. The leading ladies are buxom gun-toting virgin vamps with hearts of gold. The leading men are craggy hard-done-by hulks with more guts than brains.
As in a good comic book, you can drop in any time and not be confused by what’s going on. And the actual specifics of plot and dialogue are less important than aura and feeling.
But getting it exactly right is also getting it totally wrong. Film and comics are, obviously, different media. Superhero comics are best when they’re suggestively vague. Some kind of accident with some kind of radiation creates some kind of superpower. It all happens in other dimensions, parallel metropolises, secret lairs – places that take up residence in our imaginations.
Action movies, by contrast, are specific. Everything you need to know is onscreen, every detail carefully considered. Because we see every superhero punch and hear every love-interest scream, the very act of watching conflicts with our own idea of how a certain comic universe looks and feels.
Frank Miller perfectly recreates Sin City, but The Incredibles is the better film. Movies should be more than re-enactments that deprive us of the fun of imagining. When comics are brought to life too realistically, we always end up wondering, so why doesn’t the bad guy just shoot already?
Because we’re watching a comic book – not a movie.
